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OctaneZ writes "NASA announced that they will enter, in cooperation with Caltech, a 50ft robot in the Rose Bowl Parade - unfortunately it will be made entirely of flowers and will not attempt to enslave the crowd. However, they have mounted a camera to it, which will allow you to view the parade from the top of their creation."

Appropriate, given that it will be 2005.It is the year 2005, the treacherous Decepticons have conquered the Autobot's home planet of Cyberttron. But, on secret staging grounds, on two of Cybertron's moons, the valiant Autobots plan to retake their homeland.

But why would the California Institute of Technology make it available only in real media format? They have a direct download link for real player but why not instead link the less intrusive real alternative [free-codecs.com] It is nice to see that being a major technical university still does not even make you qualified to admin a small LAN of windows machines.

This sounds like a "robot" in the same way we've come to know "robosauraus" (that giant dinosaur car that spits fire at monster truck shows) as a robot or those remote control toys on BattleBots/RobotWars.

"Hundreds of volunteers from JPL, Caltech, their families and friends, and some local high school clubs are decorating the float. It is covered from head to toe with flowers, seeds and other natural materials. Decoration takes place at Rosemont Pavilion, next to the Rose Bowl. Today and tomorrow crews are working from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. (PST), and on December 31, as late as needed, to complete the float. Caltech manages JPL for NASA."

They'd managed to build 50ft rose-robot just for stupid parade and after that NASA tell us they can't afford a new safe space shuttle?! Oh, please!!Next time they will build some flying reindeer-robots for Santa or walking apple-pie-robots for Mothers Day!!
Nice budget planning!

Anyway, it was probably a lot cheaper to build than most things they lob up into space, so I won't fret.

Are you sure about that ? You know how much a dozen roses or a floral arrangment goes for these days ?
The amount of money the floral industry makes pushing disposable flowers for ooohs and aaahs and future activity with Mrs. Slashdot User probably makes the guys at NASA salivate.

You do know that Caltech isn't entirely privately funded, right? A very quick visit to Google finds that, like many other universities, they get grants from people like the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, U.S. Air Force, etc.

(And yes, I know about Caltech's rather impressive funding from private foundations, particularly as it relates to the Keck observatory - I've taken tour groups into one of the Keck domes more'n a couple times, and work "across the way" from Keck.)

nah it's just the usual/. article submission error... the robot's _armor_ will be entirely composed of flowers, which for maximum effect should be highly halucinogenic or some other mind altering effects to enable the robot overlords to more easily enlave humans.

unfortunately it will be made entirely of flowers and will not attempt to enslave the crowd. However, they have mounted a camera to it, which will allow you to view the parade from the top of their creation.

Just another damn peaceful robot! But but they still can at least mount an additional 100mW green laser [slashdot.org] and try to blind [slashdot.org] nearby flying airplanes!

It's not the "Rose Bowl Parade", damnit. It's the "Tournament of Roses Parade". The parade was started decades before the football game became a standard part of Pasadena's New Years Day celebration. It would be far more accurate to call the game the Tournament of Roses football game than the other way around.

I was actually sorry to see that ride go even though it was ultra gay with fairy sprinkles on top. We had corrupted that song as follows:

It goes out the door, it goes 'round the blockwe pay hundreds of bucks to put up with this crockIt goes up, it goes down, it goes all around townit's a long line after allllllll.It's a long line after all, it's a long line after all, it's a long, long line!

Our crowning moment was getting escorted out of line for singing that little ditty by the Disney cops. I'd lik

They can't even get the food supply to the ISS under control, let alone build a new launch vehicle. But they put resources into PR stunts like this. There's way too much "outreach" (read PR) at NASA. They need to close about half their centers, cut 80% of the PR operation, and focus on their core activity - putting stuff in space.

If Disney or Speilberg or Burger King wanted to pay for this, that's fine. But it's a misuse of Government funds for NASA to be doing it. I want to find

First, you know this is truly dorky because they specifically mention that the stream will play for free for Unix, Mac, and Linux users. Yay for Caltech! (Sorry, being a student there I am a bit biased.)
The other day I was thinking, why is there a person driving this thing? The reason our DARPA entry stopped was because it ran into a chain link fence (because it didn't see it). I mean, how hard can it be to write some software to tell the float to follow the float in front of it at the same speed and

I work at JPL. I'm happy that JPL/Caltech is entering the parade, but I'm not thrilled about the design of the float. I would have preferred it look more like a NASA robot (e.g. Mars Exploration Rover) rather than a transformer toy from the 80's. But the floatcam is an excellent idea!

Cal Poly Pomona started the tradition of entering a Rose Parade when both SLO and Pomona were still a unified entity. I'm sure it would not be unreasonable for Caltech to ask details about how some things are done with regards to how the Tournament of Roses wants floats to be.